News Index

We are pleased to announce that Google has allotted us with six students for this year's Summer of Code program! This is quite an achievement, seeing as how Google accepted only 1000 students, which is about 10% less than in 2008. As with the year before, the quality of the proposals submitted by students has increased significantly. This year, students who applied to Haiku were suggested to fix an issue in our bug tracker. This provided our mentors with a glimpse into the students' programming ability, as well as their ambition. Those contributions, several of which have already been committed to our SVN repository, proved to be a valuable resource when ranking the students. This allowed our mentors to strike a balance between projects that fill a need in Haiku and projects by students who have also shown themselves to be a worthy Google Summer of Code student. These students went above and beyond our requirements and expectations. They gave us hope that come October, November, and beyond, they will still be making contributions to our community. Since retaining students as community developers is one of the goals of Summer of Code, it weighed heavily in our decision. Without further ado, here is the list of students who will be sponsored by Google to contribute to Haiku in Google's Summer of Code 2009:

Integrate WebKit in Haiku native browser

Implementing ZeroConf support for Haiku with mDNSResponder

We encourage everyone to continue the hospitality that has always been a part of our community. This has become a well-earned reputation for the members of Haiku's community.

We would like to take this time to express our gratitude for all students who have submitted project proposals. Many of you have displayed that your abilities rival those who were accepted. It is an unfortunate situation that we were not allocated more student slots by Google. We are looking at ways to express our appreciation of your efforts so far. In addition we are investigating the possibility of sponsoring another Haiku Code Drive. At this point, no decision has been made and we are welcoming comments on regarding this matter. If you would like feedback regarding your proposal and suggestions for next year, feel free to contact (Matt Madia).

Thank you to all who have and continue to take the time to make Haiku's participation in Google Summer of Code a successful adventure. This includes Google for sponsoring Summer of Code, the Melange developers and contributors, and of course Haiku's Mentors.

Haiku's application for Google Summer of Code 2009™ has been accepted!

This year, the role of Haiku's Google Summer of Code primary administrator has been taken up by Matt Madia, with Stephan Aßmus acting as the backup administrator. Over the past few days, Google program administrators evaluated a total of 395 Mentoring organization applications and published their list of those accepted on Wednesday, March 18th 19:00 UTC. As you may imagine, time had seemingly slowed to a crawl in anticipation of the results!

As usual, we have created a list of suggested ideas. We encourage interested students to begin considering possible projects and more importantly to engage yourself in our community!

Here's some anecdotal data involving Google Summer of Code from the past and this year. The number of mentoring organizations has grown from 40 in 2005, to 100, to 130, and up to 175 in 2008. There were roughly 500
mentoring applications in 2008, however a good portion of those were "spammy" and does not represent an accurate count of actual applications. Google's application process this year has greatly reduced the number of "spammy" applications. The number of participating students in 2005 was 400 and has grown over the years to 1125 as of last year. For this year, Google will be establishing a cap of around 1000 students for 2009.

If you happen to be visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage conference on March 14-15, 2009, make sure to stop by the Haiku booth and say "Hi!". Attending this year on behalf of Haiku will be Stephan Aßmus, Axel Dörfler, Denise Wein and Daniel Wünsch.

The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are an event around the topic Linux and open source for everyone. The entrance ticket costs 5 EUR for both days (3 EUR for students). The event will be held at the following location:

This Saturday, the 28th of February, the software that powers the website, Drupal and 47 (!) modules, have been upgraded to the Drupal 5 platform. This upgrade creates the foundation to continue to improve the functionality and information on our website, as the demands change, also in the face of the upcoming Alpha 1 release.

While the upgrade team has concluded that most of the data migrated smoothly, there are some rough edges. Most notably, the data of the conferences did not migrate properly, and as such, we are now in the process of reconstructing the conference module. Please read on for a more detailed list of issues. Naturally we expect some more minor issues popping up. If you find any one of them, please check out the list below, and if the issue is not there, drop a comment!

The known issues are the following:

The conference functionality has disappeared.

Pages like the about page show authoring information, while it did not used to.

As many Haiku community members know, one major hurdle that has been making it difficult to port new software to Haiku has been the lack of an up-to-date GCC4 compiler. While a GCC 4.1.2 cross-compiler has been available now for some time, cross-compiling software for a GCC4-built Haiku can be painful and frustrating. What Haiku really needed was a native GCC4 toolchain to run on a GCC4-built Haiku install.

That time is now! A native Haiku GCC4.3.3 is now a reality.

Michael Lotz set out to tackle this task and the fruits of his labor have finally been committed to the Haiku repository for all to benefit from.

Michael Lotz details the process he used

To demonstrate what process was necessary to perform this task, he has written a detailed blog post recounting his experience. It's a long read, and certainly lists some confusing concepts. If you were at all curious what it would take, going from a GCC2-built Haiku to a GCC4-built Haiku with its own native compiler, the steps are all there.

Dogfooding is important... Yummy!

If you're paying attention while reading his blog, you'll note that Michael is "dogfooding" during his Haiku development. Not only does he use Haiku for development purposes, but it's also the only operating system he uses currently. This suggests a couple of important points: a) Haiku is stable enough to use daily and develop in and b) Haiku developers are serious about Haiku, intending to use it as their daily OS. I know of several developers who use Haiku daily for various tasks, including development. This demonstrates a dedication to the quality they are pursuing, and increases the likelihood that even little annoying things about Haiku are going to get fixed eventually.

What does all this mean? What's next?

Freshly-built Haiku running GCC4

So, what should we expect from Haiku now that it has a native GCC4 toolchain?

I'm not sure - and that's the exciting part actually! This opens the door for easier porting of modern software, and more easily moves Haiku out of the "dark" GCC2 cloud that BeOS had lived under.

Haiku already supports a "hybrid" environment where it is built with GCC2 for backward compatibility but also providing GCC4 libraries for future software support - or even more interesting: a GCC4-built Haiku with GCC2 libraries for backward compatibility. I think we'll see the latter becoming more common now with the availability of a native GCC4.

There are still some minor loose ends to tie up - such as providing the remaining development tools for a GCC4 Haiku (the GCC2-built ones will work, but they are not yet automatically installed with the "Development" optional package). Additionally, those who wish to build a GCC4 Haiku from within an existing GCC2-built Haiku might find it a little bit challenging. If you'd like to experiment, you may want to compile your own GCC4 Haiku from Linux, BSD, etc., or even wait for the availability of pre-built GCC4 images to appear.

These are very interesting developments, I hope you're as excited as I am at what the future holds :)

While the news may seem a little slow lately (people are likely busy during the holiday season), there has indeed been a few things happening of note.

One exciting announcement was from Christof Lutteroth letting us know that some final-year projects from the University of Auckland were prototyped using Haiku. While these prototypes and the code behind them are not yet publicly available, they have generously offered to donate this code to Haiku in the future.

At the end of the month, the main user mailing list openbeos@freelists.org will finally be renamed to haiku@freelists.org, removing the most apparent reference to our previous name, OpenBeOS, that our project had until summer of 2004. The old archive will remain accessible, and all subscribers will be moved to the new list automatically. We'll even send you a reminder when it's done, so that you'll remember to send future mails to haiku@freelists.org instead.

Thanks to FreeLists.org for making this possible, they have provided an awesome service for us over the past 7 years!

BeGeistert 019 was held last weekend in Düsseldorf and was, as far as I can tell, a great success. I've been to BeGeistert twice in the past (I think 2002 and 2003) and in my opinion the spirit of BeGeistert hasn't changed since then. Maybe there used to be some more non-coders among the guests and the focus was more on applications; that was of course because Haiku was still in its OpenBeOS nappies at that time...

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!

Google Summer of Code 2008

Andrej Spielmann has implemented sub-pixel antialiased rendering in the app_server. He was probably the only student that was always ahead of his schedule, and could even deliver more than originally anticipated. He also easily adapted to our coding style and produced a lot of quality code.

Dustin Howett intended to implement HPET support. At first, he struggled a bit with how to implement this in the best way, but eventually he found his way through this complex topic. However, he wasn't able to finish his project in time, and intends to keep working on it in the weeks to come.

Zhao Shuai implemented swap file support in the kernel that has recently been enabled. While it would be fair to say that the FreeBSD implementation and his mentor, Ingo Weinhold, helped him out a lot, he was very receptive of critics and always willing to try to understand how the kernel internals are working. In the beginning, he also wrote some overview documents about our virtual memory subsystem.

Alexandru Roman intended to add Zeroconf support to Haiku. However, he took a summer semester at school, and was surprised about the time commitment it asked for. He contacted his mentor, Ryan Leavengood, early on, and we're sad that he didn't manage to work on his project at all.

Adrien Lemaire was supposed to write a CIFS client for Haiku to let it access Windows shares. However, he was a bit overstrained with the project despite his nice application. He also didn't find the time to dig into the project, and unfortunately didn't deliver anything.

Haiku Code Drive 2008

Salvatore Benedetto intended to identify and fix most, if not all, of the remaining BFS bugs by first porting bonnie++ to Haiku. The plan was to add the missing functionality to Haiku that bonnie++ needs to run, in this case POSIX XSI semaphores. He experimented a lot with BFS, and we were able to fix several bugs together. He also implemented not only XSI semaphores, but also XSI message queues, and intends to complete his work by eventually adding support for XSI shared memory. During his project, he also ported the UDF file system to Haiku's current file system API. We're looking forward to see more from him :-)

Jovan Ivankovic was supposed to port CUPS, or parts of CUPS and integrate them with the Haiku printing layer. Unfortunately, he was not able to work much on it due to his health situation. We wish him the best!

Yin Qiu wanted to complete our ICMP handling in the networking stack. While he had a hard time with our coding style, he found his way through the stack, and came up with a good looking solution for error propagation and handling. Unfortunately it doesn't work yet okay, and is therefore not part of our repository yet, but he's continuing to work on his patch set. And we're patiently waiting for it :-)

JiSheng Zhang has written a DV media node based on the Firewire stack he ported as part of last year's Google Summer of Code. As far as I understand, he couldn't really test his work yet, though, as his Firewire hardware got lost at Olympia. In any case, he intends to stay with us to improve his work in the future.

So while we had our failures, overall we're very happy with our students. We hope to refine our selection process for next year, if we're lucky enough to be part of the Summer of Code in 2009.

And since our own Haiku Code Drive was so successful this year (even if we saved a bit of the money), we plan to continue this project in the future as well. On behalf of Haiku, let me thank you, the donors, again for making this possible.

I would also like to thank our mentors that have devoted much time for their students, and guided them through their projects.

After the date has been known for some time, Charlie Clark in the name of BeFAN and the BeGeistert orga team is now officially inviting to BeGeistert 019 from October 11. - 12. 2008 in the youth hostel Düsseldorf. Reservations are now open and should be made as soon as possible. To learn more about BeGeistert, see the BeGeistert website. It includes more info on directions, car pooling and costs. BeGeistert has a long history as one of the most important, if not the most important BeOS developer and fan summit. In recent years, the focus has shifted more and more towards Haiku. Pretty much every European Haiku developer is usually attending. BeGeistert is also a platform for presenting independent BeOS and Haiku software projects to interested users or potential new developers for your team. BeGeistert is a great opportunity for getting to know in person a lot of people one only knows via IRC or e-mail.

The coding sprint, which has been so successful before the last BeGeistert in January, will this time be held the week after BeGeistert. If you are a developer and would like to attend at the sprint, please contact Stephan Aßmus, who is responsible for the planning. The stay at the youth hostel during the coding sprint includes three meals (35 EUR/night). The hostel is providing a small conference room during the days where we can setup our gear and have some fun coding.